Category Archives: News You Can Use

Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the “composted” body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk.

A self-proclaimed environmental activist, Einhorn made a name for himself among ecological groups during the 1960s and ’70s by taking on the role of a tie-dye-wearing ecological guru and Philadelphia’s head hippie. With his long beard and gap-toothed smile, Einhorn — who nicknamed himself “Unicorn” because his German-Jewish last name translates to “one horn” —advocated flower power, peace and free love to his fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania. He also claimed to have helped found Earth Day.

But the charismatic spokesman who helped bring awareness to environmental issues and preached against the Vietnam War — and any violence — had a secret dark side. When his girlfriend of five years, Helen “Holly” Maddux, moved to New York and broke up with him, Einhorn threatened that he would throw her left-behind personal belongings onto the street if she didn’t come back to pick them up.

Yeah, I would argue that his left-wing politics were part of his “dark side.”

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 45th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 15 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey. Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Recycling might not be the first thing people think of when they hear about the National Security Agency, but the spy agency wants to change that.

The Fort Meade, Md., institution has a new pro-recycling mascot named “Dunk” that it’s using as part of an effort to get students in Maryland schools to cut down on their trash.

In a new eight-minute video released ahead of Wednesday’s Earth Day, Dunk — a blue, anthropomorphized recycling bin — explained the NSA’s commitment to recycling. Then, it offered students a project of their own.

There are three key, sobering observations about where we are today which should force this thorough, no-holds-barred review of our situation. These three points — which are backed up by the facts — suggest the United States is drifting into a crisis that could challenge our very survival.

First, it is the case that after 35 years of conflict dating back to the Iranian seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and the ensuing hostage crisis, the United States and its allies are losing the long, global war with radical Islamists. We are losing to both the violent jihad and to the cultural jihad. The violent jihad has shown itself recently in Paris, Australia, Tunisia, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Gaza, Nigeria, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Yemen, to name just some of the most prominent areas of violence. RELATED: Yemen Mess Sparks a Full-Fledged Regional War Cultural jihad is more insidious and in many ways more dangerous. It strikes at our very ability to think and to have an honest dialogue about the steps necessary for our survival. Cultural jihad is winning when the Department of Defense describes a terrorist attack at Fort Hood as “workplace violence.” Cultural jihad is winning when the president refers to “random” killings in Paris when they were clearly the actions of Islamist terrorists and targeted against specific groups. Cultural jihad is winning when the administration censors training documents and lecturers according to “sensitivity” so that they cannot describe radical Islamists with any reference to the religious ideology which is the primary bond that unites them.

Obama revenge for Netanyahu’s Congress talk? 1987 report on Israel’s top secret nuclear program released in unprecedented move.

In a development that has largely been missed by mainstream media, the Pentagon early last month quietly declassified a Department of Defense top-secret document detailing Israel’s nuclear program, a highly covert topic that Israel has never formally announced to avoid a regional nuclear arms race, and which the US until now has respected by remaining silent.

But by publishing the declassified document from 1987, the US reportedly breached the silent agreement to keep quiet on Israel’s nuclear powers for the first time ever, detailing the nuclear program in great depth.

The timing of the revelation is highly suspect, given that it came astensions spiraled out of control between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama ahead of Netanyahu’s March 3 address in Congress, in which he warned against the dangers of Iran’s nuclear program and how the deal being formed on that program leaves the Islamic regime with nuclear breakout capabilities.

This is a move to attack Israel — the only country with the stones to bomb their nuke sites.

This is more of Obama’s vengeance.

Intriguingly, the AP first tweeted the headline that the Obama crew was considering letting Iran deploy its nuclear centrifuges underground. But it looks like the Obama administration didn’t like that, and it looks like they told AP to drop the word “nuclear.”

And guess what? That’s exactly what AP did.

Now, as you’ll see in a moment, the “deal” being mulled is that the centrifuges that Iran will put beyond the reach of Israeli bombs won’t be allowed to enrich uranium.

The Regime is still running with the heroic “Leave no man behind” meme to defend the Bergdahl swap – as if this was ever about Bowe Bergdahl and not about Obama having a pretext to empty Gitmo of its most dangerous terrorists.

Last night on The Kelly File defending the trade between five Taliban leaders and Bergdahl was incoming White House communications director Jen Psaki.

“Was it worth it? Absolutely,” Psaki said about the Bergdahl swap.

“We have a commitment to our men and women serving in the military, defending our national security every day, that we’re going to do everything to bring them home if we can, and that’s what we did in this case,” she added.

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that on February 11, 2015, it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to obtain records related to the “initial report” of the U.S. Army’s review of the disappearance of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch v U.S. Department of Defense (No. 1:15-cv-00212)).

Bergdahl left his post and was held captive by the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network in Afghanistan from June 2009 until May 2014. The circumstances surrounding Bergdahl’s disappearance and subsequent capture have become the subject of intense controversy. He was released on May 31, 2014, as part of a prisoner exchange by the Obama administration for five Taliban terrorist leaders who were held at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit after the DOD failed to comply with a FOIA request submitted on October 22, 2014, asking for:

Any and all records of communications, including by not limited to, emails and text messages, from or to (as either a direct recipient, “Cc” or Bcc”) Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, and the following members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Military Service Chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps; and the Chief of the National Guard Bureau, regarding, concerning, or related to the ‘initial report’ of the Army’s review of the disappearance of Bowe Bergdahl from his post and his subsequent capture by Taliban forces. The time frame of the records sought is September 1, 2014 to October 28, 2014.

The prisoner exchange by the Obama administration has also been the subject of intense controversy. The Government Accountability Office found that the Obama administration violated “clear and unambiguous” law in the prisoner swap. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 says that all prisoner transfers from Guantanamo Bay require 30 days’ notice to Congress. Such notice was not provided in Bergdahl’s case.

Defense Obligations: Despite Russian submarine activity that’s up a reported 50% and a rising cruise-missile threat, President Obama can’t find the time to meet with NATO’s new secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg.

Following a pattern of talking only to our enemies and not to Congress or allies such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama apparently has decided to ignore Stoltenberg during a three-day visit to the U.S. According to Bloomberg, Stoltenberg’s office requested a meeting in advance of the visit, but heard nothing back from the White House.

The president presumably is too busy explaining to the Iranian people why we must sign a nuclear Munich deal with an enemy whose leaders shout, “Death to America!”

Stoltenberg, twice the prime minister of Norway, met with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Monday, to discuss the upcoming NATO summit, the rising threat of the Islamic State worldwide and Russia’s aggression toward and annexation of Ukraine.

The new NATO chief is well aware of increasing Russian bomber patrols that include mock attack runs on NATO members Britain and Sweden along with threats to aim nuclear missiles at Danish warships. The patrols have also buzzed U.S. warships, overflown Guam and approached within cruise missile range of Los Angeles.

“It is hard for me to believe that the president of the United States has not found time to meet with the new secretary general of NATO given the magnitude of what this implies, and the responsibilities of his office,” says Kurt Volker, who served as U.S. permanent representative to NATO under both Obama and President George W. Bush.

Agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration reportedly had “sex parties” with prostitutes hired by drug cartels in Colombia, according to a new inspector general report released by the Justice Department on Thursday.

In addition, Colombian police officers allegedly provided “protection for the DEA agents’ weapons and property during the parties,” the report states. Ten DEA agents later admitted attending the parties, and some of the agents received suspensions of two to 10 days.

Federal prosecutors are trying to pressure a Dearborn cleric popular with ISIS fighters from the West to answer questions about his finances, concerned that he might be getting money illegally.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit said in recent court filings that Ahmad Jebril, 43, a religious leader with an international following, is deliberately not complying with the terms of his probation in his fraud case and misleading authorities about the sources of his money and assets. His attorney, Rita Chastang, said she fears that Jebril may be slapped with new criminal charges for lying to authorities, saying he’s being subjected to an “unprecedented … level of scrutiny” for a fraud case.

Jebril was convicted in 2005 on 42 counts of financial fraud, served 61/2 years in prison and was released in 2012 with three years of probation that ends March 30. He owes more than $250,000 in restitution, of which he has paid only $3,080, according to a court filing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Per our tipster, Norton performed the sub-par squeeze-in around the same time the rest of her colleagues were crowding into the House chamber to hear the joint address by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

At around the 40-second mark, an oblivious U.S. Capitol Police officer appears to zoom by on a motorcycle, right past the textbook parking offense.

Once the aide seen assisting Norton from outside the slow-moving vehicle finishes waving her into clearly disastrous position, Norton emerges from the car, clicks her remote locking device (better safe than sorry) and starts to walk away.

Then, all of the sudden, she doubles back.

Has her conscience gotten the best of her? Is she going to slide a quickly composed apology onto the now-stuck truck’s windshield? Or perhaps a business card?

Nope.

Norton simply retrieves some forgotten item from inside the car and then heads on her merry way.

* Wow, it’s not Monday is it? (I originally had this link-around posted as “Monday Catch-up”. I’ve been traveling for over a week, so forgive me if I seem a little disoriented.

Our plane out of Minneapolis was delayed for over an hour, last night (at Gate Hate) so we missed our connecting flight in St. Louis – and that was the last flight of the night. My husband didn’t want to spend the night in St. Louis, so we rented a car (at midnight) and drove the 3 1/2 hours to Kansas City, getting home at 3:30.

An ISIS leader named Yousef al-Salafi in Pakistan has admitted that ISIS is being funded by the USA, and thus, the Obama administration. This came from a statement done by the Pakistani government which interrogated Yousef and received this information from him. There was a news report done on this:

Obama’s State Dept. Spokesperson says we can’t just kill our way out of this problem…But can’t we? Also, find out how this resembles Mitt Romney.

Giuliani Tells CNN He’s Getting Death Threats over Obama Comments:

CNN reporter Jim Acosta spoke with Rudy Giuliani over the phone earlier today and told Anderson Cooper that the former New York mayor claimed he’s been getting death threats after his controversial remarks about whether President Obama loves America.

Acosta goes on to report that Rudy says most calls have been supportive, and he has even received a call from Gov. Bobby Jindal who backed him up on the comments.

From a guaranteed right to hormone therapy for transgendered illegal aliens, to a prospective Attorney General saying that illegals have the same right to a job as US citizens or legal immigrants, the ongoing sham of the Obama administration’s under-the-radar policies get seen in the light of day in Bill Whittle’s latest FIREWALL.

“It was nice of the President to give us a history lesson at the Prayer breakfast,” Jindal said. “Today, however, the issue right in front of his nose, in the here and now, is the terrorism of Radical Islam, the assassination of journalists, the beheading and burning alive of captives. We will be happy to keep an eye out for runaway Christians, but it would be nice if he would face the reality of the situation today. The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.”

So freaking obvious – but it needed to be said.

Also good – this from Jonah Goldberg: Horse Pucky from Obama: The president’s comparison of Christianity to radical Islam defies logic.

When Obama alludes to the evils of medieval Christianity, he fails to acknowledge the key word: “medieval.” What made medieval Christianity backward wasn’t Christianity but medievalism.

It is perverse that Obama feels compelled to lecture the West about not getting too judgmental on our “high horse” over radical Islam’s medieval barbarism in 2015 because of Christianity’s medieval barbarism in 1215.

It’s also insipidly hypocritical. President Obama can’t bring himself to call the Islamic State “Islamic,” but he’s happy to offer a sermon about Christianity’s alleged crimes at the beginning of the last millennium.

“Everything he does is to minimize what’s happening, to hold us back and to essentially deny the gravity of what’s happening. That’s why today he had to compare it to the Crusades and to the Inquisition, which is simply astonishing. Mr. President, the Crusades were 800 years ago, and the Inquisition 500 years ago. What’s happening right now is not Christians on the march. It is radical Islam.”

Barack Obama is not, in any meaningful way, a Christian and I am not sure he needs to continue the charade. With no more elections for him, he might as well come out as the atheist/agnostic that he is. He took his first step in doing so yesterday in a speech reeking with contempt for faith in general and Christianity in particular.

Christian leaders and grassroots Christian believers were quick to condemn the remarks, but in our view many have missed the mark by getting drawn into arguments over the history of the Crusades rather than recognizing that the real depravity in Obama’s remarks is that it accepts and promotes the idea that events of hundreds of years ago justify a never-ending cycle of violence and retribution.

If one accepts Obama’s concept of history then reconciliation between tribal, religious and racial “enemies” can never be accomplished; peace between the IRA and the Orangemen can never happen; Hutus and Tutsis must battle forever, or until one exterminates the other; and Christians and Muslims and Jews and Muslims can never live in peace because one will always have a historical grievance against the other that can only be settled with blood.

This is almost the exact opposite of the aspirations, and the reality, of the American founding.

America was in large degree established by pilgrims and pioneers seeking to escape the endless ethnic, religious and dynastic upheaval of Europe. And by crossing the Atlantic to a New World they didn’t just hope to escape the religious and ethnic conflicts of the Old World, they resolved to banish them from the New.

Those who hold Obama’s view of history will no doubt quickly point out that the pilgrims and pioneers who came here and established their havens from European religious and ethnic oppression themselves conducted a brutal war against the Native Americans. Consequently, they were not saints and all of the subsequent history of European America is tainted by their acts.

The Commander in Chief now has an official excuse to explain his massive failures on the world stage. “Smart-power” “don’t do stupid stuff” or “leading from behind” have morphed into a new Obama Doctrine called “strategic patience:

This government is nothing but more ridiculous spin and Twitter Initiatives to cover its shameful failures.

White House Unveils Call for ‘Strategic Patience’Critics accuse the administration of being too slow to act in Syria and Russia. In a new strategy document, the White House will say that was the plan all along.

BY GOPAL RATNAMFEBRUARY 5, 2015

Critics of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy have for years assailed his administration for responding too slowly to crises ranging from Syria to Russia. In a far-reaching blueprint released Friday that outlines the administration’s worldview, the White House insisted the United States is leading the global effort to confront challenges in a deliberate manner described as “strategic patience.”

That would be good spin if this alleged long-held devotion to “strategic patience” were now bearing some kind of positive (or even neutral) fruit, instead of a series of disasters, as it actually is.

They’re trying to put a terrorist-appeasing leftist into power in the Jewish state using Arab votes. How very Obama-like.

A stunning new report today in the Washington Free Beacon reveals that a U.S.-based progressive alliance will use operatives who worked on President Obama’s 2012 reelection to drum up votes among Arabs in an effort to unseat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The group, known as Ameinu, “is in contact with experts from Obama’s reelection team, which was involved in ‘similar’ operations,” according to the Beacon.

Before we answer this question, we might venture to ask: what is medicine? Here is a plausible answer: medicine is the enterprise of restoring bodily faculties to their proper function. Our bodily faculties are ordered toward certain ends. This seems impossible to deny. Eyes, for example, are ordered toward (i.e., their function is) seeing, the stomach is ordered toward breaking down food, the heart is ordered toward pumping blood, etc. So if, say, someone’s eyes were not able to achieve their end of sight well, it would be rightly considered a medical procedure to seek to restore this individual’s eyes to their proper function. Similarly, it would be a medical endeavor to seek to restore an individual’s defective heart (one that has arrhythmia, say) to its proper function. All well and good.

But what are we to make of this “gender reassignment” surgery? Insofar as such a surgical procedure involves the intentional damaging and mutilating of otherwise perfectly functioning bodily faculties by twisting them to an end toward which they are not ordered, such a thing cannot, in principle, possibly be considered a medical procedure. And because love compels us to seek the good for another, it is thus a grave evil to condone such surgical procedures.

Written by a person who has gone through the process – and regrets it –

I am worried about Jenner because his current journey is the mirror image of mine 30 years ago. I know the journey, the pitfalls, the highs and the lows of changing genders. I look at the pictures of Bruce Jenner plastered on the Internet and it’s like I’m witnessing a movie of my own life from 30 years ago, with Bruce playing the leading role.

Stalling the attorney general nominee would be a ‘concrete’ tool ‘to rein in the president’s lawlessness,’ he says.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is demanding that Republicans block the nomination of Loretta Lynch as attorney general until President Barack Obama relents on his immigration policies.

The likely presidential candidate said in an interview Tuesday that Republicans should use “every procedural tool” to block Obama’s move to defer deportations for roughly 5 million undocumented immigrants — calling on the GOP-led Senate Judiciary Committee to block her nomination and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to deny her a confirmation vote on the floor.

Paul asked the team about Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) question during Lynch’s Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing about whether she’d oppose using a drone to kill an American citizen on American soil.

When Paul heard about her non-answer—she wouldn’t commit that the federal government does not have such authority—he was incredulous. Furthermore, Paul was appalled that Lynch came out in favor of President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty and the use of asset forfeiture—where the federal government seizes people’s property sometimes with flimsy reasoning, something even the Obama administration has offered slight opposition to—and then told his office staff he’s going to oppose her and aim to derail her nomination chances. “Oh, she’s going down,” Paul said to the room.

American workers at the power company Southern California Edison were laid off and forced to train their H-1B replacements. The Obama Administration is pushing to double the number of H-1B workers hired to replace Americans at lower wages. The stock of STEM and IT guest workers in the United States is so large that 2/3 of all new IT jobs are now being filled by workers imported from abroad.

In addition to sustained, unskilled permanent immigration, President Obama has unilaterally increased guest worker programs for corporations that disadvantage U.S. employees, unilaterally work-authorizing H-1B spouses. Overall, since 2009, the President has expanded work authorizations 5.5 million beyond the existing levels established. To learn more about the systemic displacement of domestic university-trained Americans, please see page 19 here.

Like this:

Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (Ret.), on Fox News yesterday, was asked what the right response to Islamic terrorism throughout the world.

“There is only one answer,” he began. “You kill the terrorists – these Islamic fanatics – and you keep on killing them for years and decades. You kill them in large groups, you kill them in small groups. And you kill them in onesies and twosies.

Peters noted that in Washington DC, the group-think is ‘you can’t play whack-a-mole.’

“Well, if you’re not going to play ‘whack-a-mole’ and kill them wherever you find them, you will lose.”

Evidence is mounting as sources with close ties to military intelligence saying that the Army has concluded its investigation and will in fact charge Bergdahl with desertion. What is in this evidence must include some of our findings which we will show again here which prove that the Bergdahls, both father and son, have left quite a trail to show their Taliban links.

The Obama administration of course has vigorously pushed back, saying there has been no decision to prosecute Bergdahl and that reports are way off base.

But how could Obama’s testimony that “reports are off base” be more credible than members of Bergdahl’s unit who served beside him came forward and told their version of Bergdahl’s military exploits said that not only he deserted his unit but took up with enemy forces. In fact, some of these voices came out right after the deal but were ignored.

For one thing, the Government Accountability Office says that if he really is a deserter, the trade to return him was illegal. For another, we know from the Army brass’ response to the Fort Hood massacre by Maj. Nidal Hasan — which is still classified as “workplace violence” — the Army’s own credibility is also under a cloud. But the question is, who is behind all this twisting if not for Obama? It was the White House who termed the Taliban as “Armed Insurgents” instead of “Terrorists,” a term that does not hold water.

Libyan officials were deeply concerned in 2011, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was trying to remove Moammar Gadhafi from power, that weapons were being funneled to NATO-backed rebels with ties to al Qaeda, fearing that well-armed insurgents could create a safe haven for terrorists, according to secret intelligence reports obtained by The Washington Times.

The reports included a 16-page list of weapons that Libyans supposedly tracked to the rebels from Western sources or their allies in the region. The memos were corroborated by a U.S. intelligence asset familiar with the documents as well as former top Gadhafi regime official Mohammed Ismael.

“NATO has given permission to a number of weapons-loaded aircraft to land at Benghazi airport and some Tunisian airports,” the intelligence report said, identifying masses of weapons including tanks and surface-to-air missiles.

That report, which was prepared in English so it could be passed by a U.S. intelligence asset to key members of Congress, identified specific air and sea shipments observed by Libyan intelligence moving weapons to the rebels trying to unseat the Gadhafi regime.

President Obama said Monday he will reject any budget from Congress that doesn’t boost spending on both defense and his own domestic priorities, saying the spending “sequesters” need to go.”America can’t afford being short-sighted and I’m not going to allow it,” the president said while speaking at the Homeland Security Department as he released his $4 trillion budget for fiscal 2016.
His budget calls for boosting discretionary spending by more than 6 percent, and raising taxes to pay for it.

Protests against the influence of the Koch brothers have broken out anew in reaction to the announcement that they plan to spend $890 million on the upcoming presidential campaign. Yet even their non-political giving has garnered opposition—most recently in the wake of an announced $1.75 million grant to the Catholic University of America.

Grant Gallicho, a writer for Commonweal who thinks it is fine for Catholics to pay for abortion but not for libertarians to pay for Catholic education, repeats worries from a group of theologians that this sends “a confusing message to Catholic students and other faithful Catholics that the Koch brothers’ anti-government, Tea Party ideology has the blessing of a university sanctioned by Catholic bishops.”

Like this:

A post from 2006 with special relevance today as it relates to the racialist and feminist propaganda that is currently besieging the nation.

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions. Yes, the Nazis did this, through organizations like the “German-American Bund” that was outlawed when World War II went hot. Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through fairly transparent front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya(disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.

On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.

Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

Katherine Ann Porter had been duped, badly. In her memoir, “The Never-Ending Wrong,” published on the 50th anniversary of the 1927 execution of convicted murderers Nichola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Porter told how this came to be.

As the anarchists’ final hours ticked down, Porter had been standing vigil with others artists and writers in Boston. Ever the innocent liberal, Porter approached her group leader, a “fanatical little woman” and a dogmatic Communist, and expressed her hope that Sacco and Vanzetti could still be saved.

The response of this female comrade is noteworthy largely for its candor: “Saved … who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?”

As their predecessors did with Sacco and Vanzetti, progressives in 2014 falsified narratives and manufactured outrage to advance some ill-defined leftist agenda.

What is different now is that progressives no longer content themselves with claiming the guilty innocent. Dating back to the arrest of George Zimmerman in 2012, they are prepared to claim the innocent guilty, a darker turn altogether.

Their goal might be as grubby as enriching a race hustler or as grand as turning a presidential election, but no longer is it about justice, and always there is someone to accuse.

Nearly a century after Sacco and Vanzetti’s demise, crowds stood vigil outside the Ferguson, Missouri, police station waiting to hear whether a grand jury would indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of black 18-year-old Michael Brown.

In the crowd were many protesters as naive as Porter had been. In the crowd, too, were leftist agitators eager to see Wilson go uncharged. After all, what earthly good would Wilson do them in jail?

The Soviets called the practice “framing” – that is, taking a small kernel of truth and rewriting the history of a person or an event around it.

In Ferguson, that small kernel was the testimony of Brown’s partner in crime, Dorian Johnson. Immediately after the shooting Johnson told all who would listen that Brown raised his hands to surrender before Wilson shot him dead in a Ferguson street. The story could not withstand the least bit of scrutiny.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department funneled at least $1.5 million in grants to a New York legal-aid group featured in a new rap video that depicts two young black men aiming handguns at a white police officer.

Some may find the lyrics eerily similar to the social media postings of the man accused of shooting and killing two New York City police officers execution-style in Brooklyn on Saturday.

The video for “Hands Up,” which also shows a white police officer gunning down a black motorist wearing a hoodie, contains lyrics suggesting revenge for much-publicized deaths of black men in confrontations with police.

On this week’s episode of the official broadcast of the New Black Panthers Party’s “Black Power Radio,” the former national chairman of the New Black Panther Party and current national president of Black Lawyers for Justice, Malik Zulu Shabazz said 2015 is the time to “build up that army” and go “to the gun range.”

“And Mister Malcolm X, he consistently teaches us self defense,” Shabazz said. “The most honorable Elijah Muhammad continuously teaches us self defense. The honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey teaches us self defense, and we know, our leader and our teacher the honorable Khalid Abdul Muhammad teaches us self defense. What am I saying? Right now it’s time to build up that army. Right now it’s time for us to build up those corps, those troops. It’s time to get strong. It’s time for lifting weights and working out and going to the gun range and all of that.”

Law enforcement officers across our area are being warned to watch out after a patrol car was sabotaged and two officers were shot at in two separate incidents.

On this busy New Year’s Eve, personal safety has been emphasized as much as public safety.

The Harris County Precinct 7 Constable’s Office confirmed one of its cars was sabotaged. The attack was on a sergeant’s take-home marked unit. He noticed a warning light and when he took it in for repair, a county technician discovered someone had intentionally cut the car’s anti-lock braking system. Left undetected in an emergency, it could have been disastrous. An investigation is underway.

Additionally, a Harris County Sheriff’s Office sergeant believes he was shot at.

A man in St Louis has been charged with threatening to kill police and cause an explosion at the city jail in Twitter posts that referenced Ferguson, the nearby town where an officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old led to protests and rioting.

Jason Valentine is accused of 10 counts of making a terrorist threat, a felony punishable by up to seven years in prison in Missouri. The charges relate to 10 tweets that Valentine, 35, is alleged to have posted in December with the intention of “frightening 10 or more people”.

Several referred to New Year’s Eve as “kill a pig night”, according to a probable cause statement released on Thursday by the St Louis circuit attorney, which claimed Valentine “used the slang ‘pig’ … to describe police officers” and was threatening to kill them.

One tweet allegedly said: “St Louis City Justice Center Mysteriously Exploded 12/31/2014”. Prosecutors charge that was a threat to cause an explosion at the building. Their statement said police “considered these threats to be serious in nature” and claimed that “kill a pig night” had “gained momentum nationally”.

“Police brutality” is an all-purpose piece of rhetoric that, as such, can mean anything and everything—and, thus, nothing at all. When anti-police misologists—a “misologist” was the word that the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant used when referring to an enemy of reason—sound off about “police brutality,” they are referring to the police’s unjustified use of force.

Now, all but anarchists concede that police are authorized to use force when necessary and when it’s proportionate to the situation in question. When, however, the force deployed is unnecessary and/or excessive, then the force is unjustified. This—the unnecessary and/or excessive use of force—is “police brutality.”

So, is this a growing national phenomenon, an epidemic?

Not even close.

According to the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), in 1999, of 44 million people who had face-to-face interactions with police officers, less than one-half of one percent was “threatened with or actually experienced force.”

I want you to know that I see you. I see you choose the booth in the restaurant that allows you to have your back against the wall. I see you walking to your next traffic stop while you hope that it isn’t your last. I see you pulled over, two hours past your shift, as you finish your reports under a street light. I see you as you direct traffic in the scorching heat, the gusting snow, and the downpour of rain. I see you being filmed every time you try to do your job. I see you as you watch mainstream media crucify your character while minimizing your cause. I see that you are tired. I see that you are frustrated and misunderstood. I see that you are hurting as the world watches you bury your brothers and sisters that died because they were guilty of one thing; wearing a uniform with a badge. I see you. I see that you are flesh and bones just like me. I see that you are a human being who has a heart that beats for your calling to serve and protect. I see your cause and I want you to know that I appreciate it.

Some of us, who are old enough to remember the old television police series Dragnet may remember Sergeant Joe Friday saying, “Just the facts, ma’am.” But that would be completely out of place today. Facts are becoming obsolete, as recent events have demonstrated.

What matters today is how well you can concoct a story that fits people’s preconceptions and arouses their emotions. Politicians like New York mayor Bill de Blasio, professional demagogues like Al Sharpton, and innumerable irresponsible people in the media have shown that they have great talent in promoting a lynch-mob atmosphere toward the police.

Grand juries that examine hard facts live in a different world from mobs who listen to rhetoric and politicians who cater to the mobs.

As he showed when the Castro brothers rejected repeated entreaties to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba, Obama can display exceptional determination, even imagination, in finding a path to surrender.

When the Castros wouldn’t accept his entreaties, Obama turned to the Vatican to offer the candy.

The Castros have no intention of loosening their grip on Cuban society, or of opening the Internet to free speech, as Obama has claimed. But they will take U.S. taxpayer subsidies from the Ex-Im Bank to finance purchases from fellow-Communist China. How’s that for a good deal!

And so, Iran. Obama has now written to Supreme Terrorist – sorry, Supreme Leader – Ayatollah Khamenei four times since taking office in 2009. And each time, Khamenei has responded with insults and rejection.

As I’ve reported over the last four years, Obamacare’s reviled medical-device tax has forced companies to cut back on research and development, in addition to catalyzing layoffs of at least 33,000 workers over the past year. A recent study by the New York Federal Reserve found that half of the state’s medical device manufacturers were bracing for “considerably” higher health care costs as a result of Obamacare rules. These include “higher deductibles, increased copays, higher out-of-pocket maximums and an increased employee contribution to the premium.”

Who’s “stupid” now? The fallout from intrepid Philadelphia investment adviser and citizen researcher Rich Weinstein’s exposure of Obamacare architect/deceiver Jonathan Gruber has only just begun. Far worse than Gruber’s insult of American voters, Weinstein notes, is the annual $250 billion tax grab at the heart of Gruber and Company’s scheme. Obamacare’s so-called “Cadillac tax” on expensive health plans was purposely “mislabeled,” Gruber said in video uncovered by Weinstein, in order to pass a tax that will eventually hit all employer plans.

Separately, insurers have been lobbying for a total taxpayer bailout of an estimated $1 billion in 2014. Meanwhile, beleaguered Obamacare non-profit “co-ops” that were supposed to lower costs have sucked up $2 billion in loans to date and hundreds of millions more in emergency solvency funding this year.

“The funding community has dramatically and almost uniformly abandoned health care advocacy,” said Rachel Rosen DeGolia, executive director of the Universal Health Care Action Network, a national organization that links pro-health reform groups. “Good architects think about how their masterpiece will be maintained before construction. … Good builders consider keeping termites away from the woodwork.”

Part of the challenge for the Obama administration dates to the months after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in 2010 — the “BFD” moment, as Vice President Joe Biden memorably put it.

Advocates thought they could declare victory and move on. Major liberal groups turned their attention, and their wallets, away from health care reform and toward other causes like climate change, immigration and Wall Street regulation. Health care voices might not have been silenced. But they were muted.

Meanwhile, elected Democrats, including President Barack Obama himself, were skittish about defending Obamacare. The president scarcely spoke about it for long stretches. Even if the advocates had stuck around to invest in an echo chamber, there wouldn’t have been much to echo.

“Everyone assumed that the big battle was passage,” said Neera Tanden, who worked on the ACA in the Obama White House and continues to advocate for it as president of Center for American Progress. “People didn’t see the entrenched opposition and how much this was ground zero for the tea party.”

“As a person who has tried to encourage funders to support the ACA implementation process,” Tanden added, “it’s been frustrating.”

Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson has united with Judicial Watch to launch “a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) seeking “any and all records” relating to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) background checks and other records on the award-winning correspondent.”

Judicial Watch issued a press release which explained why the suit was filed:

According to documents obtained last month by Judicial Watch in a separate lawsuit, the DOJ and the White House targeted the former CBS correspondent as a result of her investigations into the growing Operation Fast and Furious scandal. In an October 4, 2011, email to White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz, Attorney General Eric Holder’s top press aide, Tracy Schmaler, described Attkisson as “out of control.” Schmaler added ominously, “I’m also calling Sharryl’s [sic] editor and reaching out to Scheiffer” (an apparent reference to CBS’ Chief Washington Correspondent and Face the Nation moderator Bob Scheiffer). Schultz responded, “Good. Her piece was really bad for the AG.”

Kristi Clemens Rogers, wife of the Congressman, is the CEO of the American corporate arm of AEGIS DEFENSE SYSTEMS — a security contracting firm with divisions and contracts all over the globe. Clemens married the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, but not before landing a 5-year, $10 billion contract under the Department of State’s Worldwide Protective Services program for Aegis. By the way, according to an article entitled, “Family Connections Pay Off Big in Washington, D.C., by M. Caulfield, February 24, 2014, Mike Rogers happened to be part of the committee that had congressional oversight of the contract.

FAST FORWARD TO BENGHAZI

A source close to the Benghazi investigation believes that the London arm of Aegis, LLC was likely instructed by Kristi Clemens Rogers ( not verifiable publicly) to hire the BLUE MOUNTAIN GROUP to guard the ill-fated U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

FOLLOWING SO FAR?

it is believed that Blue Mountain, the guard service, was hired by Aegis, LLC London and was working with their local partner in Libya, Eclipse where they went ahead and hired local agents — as we have learned, al Qaeda MILITIA – to guard the Benghazi compound and the Tripoli consulate.

Under their noses, the CIA and MI 6 — the British Secret Service — were running guns via Libya al Qaeda operatives to Syria.

FOREIGN POLICY GONE WILD IN BENGHAZI:

Security practices at the Benghazi compound, where Blue Mountain guards patrolled with flashlights and batons, instead of guns, have come under US government scrutiny in the wake of the September 11, 2012 attack.

As reported by “Reuters,” Blue Mountain hired about 20 Libyan men – including some who say they had minimal training — to screen visitors and help patrol the mission in Benghazi.

The State Department has declined to comment on the company other than confirming it was the contractor in Benghazi.

The BBC reported that on the advice of a US diplomatic regional security officer, the mission in Benghazi was not given the full contract despite lobbying by the private security contractors.

Instead, the US consulate in Libya, and outpost in Benghazi, were guarded externally by a force of local militia, many of whom reportedly put down their weapons and fled once the mission came under concerted attack.

The blame falls squarely on the State Department and Hillary Clinton, but the role that was played by Kristi Clemens Rogers is this for sure:

Kristi Clemens Rogers provided on June 21, 2010, The Commission on Wartime Contracting, a statement on Aegis private security overview. The web of holding company and sub holding companies doing business with the US Government as “security detail” spans the map of the most treacherous and hostile places on the planet. These efforts are left to the private companies being paid per assignment — millions are being made by private companies of security detail.

Millions of dollars are made by the private companies to protect US interests overseas. It’s a private-public partnership with the United States Government that was clearly under-managed by the US State Department.

Kristi Rogers played an important role in the acquisition of the Aegis, LLC security firm, may have had knowledge of what was happening on the ground in Benghazi, and testified to Congress on the overall aspects of the company to an oversight committee. She knew more than the average CEO regarding intelligence issues in Benghazi.

As sources close to the uncovering of the Benghazi attack tell me, “so many people had knowledge of the CIA operations in Benghazi including the White House, The State Department, Congressional Members, John Boehner, Republican leadership, Democratic leadership, Senators and security firms, that if we handed out official indictments, the entire United Government would be at risk of crumbling.”

….therefore, getting a special prosecutor and to have an internal audit of the processes have gone awry. Don’t depend on your elected officials to dig deep into these issues as they too may have known and implications of who, what, when and why are widespread.

WHAT ROLE DID KRISTI ROGERS PLAY EXACTLY?

Simply put: In Washington, D.C., family connections pay off big time and in this case the American people have yet to understand how much was paid to the Rogers’ and how and who Kristi had influence over with regard to the lack of security in Benghazi.